As always, I highly value your insight!

HUGE save files. If an NPC finds a mushroom on its way to work, a save file has to be written that the NPC put that item in its pocket – how much it weighed, how much it was worth.

If an NPC in another part of the game world finishes his breakfast and realizes he’s out of cereal – that means that every NPC in the entire game has its own inventory of items and how much they’ve been used, what their durability is, etc.

Even MORE complicated is the concept of placement. Let’s say an NPC nudges a candlestick and it falls over. The movement of that item creates HUGE save files – ala Oblivion.

I’d like to see how developers are going to work around the massive amount of save data to work around that.

If I had any one single suggestion to make, it’d be to consider genre conventions and how those might fit into the sets of verbs you make available.

Players, in my experience, are far more likely to query the motives of an NPC when the NPC is doing something they don’t like than when the NPC is ‘in their pocket.’ This is just a very human reaction, and ultimately it comes down to metagaming – how much does the player trust the GM to be portraying the characters consistently. Players also tend to over react to any NPC which is even mildly rude to them (ie. he told me to go away!!! I will kill him!!)

I think the best option is the second one, where you just simulate the things that are important to the player. Personally, I don’t care if I never see an NPC sleep; in fact, it’d be rather aggravating to want to deal with an NPC right before logging off, only to find that NPC is sleeping and I’m unable to wake him or her up.

I think you also touch upon another interesting topic, how you present the info to the players. I had a question from someone who saw the Storybricks demo today where someone asked about all the possible influences on an NPC’s behavior. I said that we need to be careful, because having more influences than the player can easily track can lead to results seeming almost random. “Why is the King telling me to get out of his sight? I’ve done a ton of quests for him and he’s set to be friendly. Oh, but he has an unreasoning hatred of the color pea green, and I’m wearing the jaunty new hat I got….” Presenting the information in a way that makes sense to the player is a huge issue we need to consider.

Obviously, there are always going to be issues. We might be doing some cool stuff with A.I., but there’s no way we can accurately simulate interpersonal relationships perfectly in a game. But, I think we can do a lot better than the robots, as you put it, that we see in games today. After just a few months of work, I think we already see some deeper interactions, in fact!

Anyway, interesting thoughts. More info for us to consider.